Extraordinary Leader : Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders

Secrets for developing leadership and competitive advantage in any organization The Extraordinary Leaderis a research-based book about leadership. It analyzes 200,000 assessments from 20,000 managers and presents new insights that demystify this complex subject. It clearly establishes the importance of developing great leaders versus being satisfied with merely good ones, and highlights the link between leadership behavior and an organization's performance. From the authors' research, a new model of leadership emerges that challenges long-held beliefs about leadership competencies. The authors identify 16 competencies that tower above all the others-shy;shy;the ones that separate great leaders from the average. One of the book's major breakthroughs is its focus on the importance of maximizing strengths as opposed to merely correcting weaknesses. Further, the importance of balanced strengths is introduced: when strengths are clustered in one area, the leader is less effective than he or she could be with strengths in different areas.

John H. Zenger, D.B.A., is the vice chairman of Provant, Inc., the world's largest performance skills improvement company. One of today's most authoritative voices on the topics of performance and leadership, he is the author or coauthor of six books, including Results-Based Leadership­­honored as the best book of 2000 by the Society of Human Resource Management.

Joseph Folkman, Ph.D., is managing director of Novations Group, Inc., a Provant company. He is the author of three books: Turning Feedback Into Change, Making Feedback Work, and Employee Surveys That Make a Difference.